Up Late

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While adults rave over Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 Women’s Prize winner Hamnet, children have been enthralled by her new picture book Where Snow Angels Go, illustrated with quiet beauty by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. Sylvie wakes in the night with a fever to discover that she has a snow angel guardian keeping her safe. I’d mulled over something like this before, but Torrey’s articulation revealed to me a cruelty: people of colour, LGBT people, sex workers, anyone in the so-called margins, aren’t permitted to write fiction. Not really. Instead, our creativity must be ushered swiftly into the political.

Dean Browne was a recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. What’s the book actually about? Fear of turning into one’s parents? Boredom? Unfulfilment? Christmas? I don’t know. But I’m very excited, typing this up, to spend this Christmas with Frits again. A book I read for the first time this year was Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country. I’m a Wharton fan— The Age of Innocence is probably my favourite novel—but even I was surprised by how much I loved this. Has there ever been a better depiction of a social climber? Undine Spragg is gorgeous, ladylike, ambitious and in need of a filthy rich husband (or several). People mistake her beauty for vulnerability, and she uses their naivete against them. Everyone’s too busy admiring her style and good looks to notice they should be extremely frightened of her. She’s deeply impatient—with bad taste, ugliness, dullness, boredom. Nothing brings her more pleasure than a good party, a fashionable dress, a favourable glance. She’s an assassin; she might be the most vicious character ever written. What I mean to say: she is an icon, the moment. There’s something sadly modern about her too. When she’s asked what she wants she simply replies, ‘I want what the others want.’ Poor Undine, even her desires aren’t her own. Wharton is interesting because she’s never instructive; no good deed goes unpunished in her work. Through the reading and shortlisting process, the judges spoke often about their sense of responsibility toward the incredible selection of books submitted, and how they felt that the wealth of works in contention across all categories was a strong testament to the vitality of poetry in the UK today.”Poets including Helen Mort, Mohammed El-Kurd and Clare Pollard have been shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prizes for Poetry. Suffering anorexia in her teens, an attempt to claim “ownership of [her] body,” she entered psychoanalysis for seven years, which she says “taught [her] to think.” The illness seemed to foreshadow many of the preoccupations—death, control, form—of her poetry: The Forward Arts Foundation, which runs the awards, also announced that next year’s judging panels will be chaired by Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor. Evaristo will chair the panel judging the collection length entries, while Taylor will chair the panel focusing on best single poem and a new category for best single poem – performed. Up Late is Laird’s fifth collection of poetry and his eighth book-length publication; he is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast: these facts make the significant lazinesses of the work difficult to skate over; the tonelessness of the collection prevents wholesale recommendation. It is obvious Laird has ability as a poet, and it is easy to imagine him having written better. This year’s favourite is ‘The Writing Life’, a version of which you can read here. This beautiful essay is about a class Chee took with Annie Dillard in 1989, and paints a picture of Dillard, of their relationship (warm, respectful, funny) and of Dillard’s approach to writing pedagogy. It’s a masterclass in writing and, quite literally, a masterclass in writing, and has taught me more about writing in my regular re-readings than I care to admit.

D. No, I have discovered the origin of life. Fourteen months I hesitated before I concluded this diagnosis. I received the morning star for this. My head will be left at death for clever medical analysis. The laugh will be gone and the microbe in command. Mónica Parle, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity which runs the Forward Prizes, added: “We are incredibly proud of this year’s shortlist: it represents such a strong mix of known names and new talent, and perfectly embodies our aims at Forward, to champion the diverse scope of contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland.Shortlisted alongside Sy-Quia were Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd, The English Summer by Holly Hopkins, Some Integrity by Padraig Regan, and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: Mendelson reproduces some of Auden’s explanatory diagrams to Isherwood—for example, about his ars poetica, The Sea and the Mirror—though he doesn’t include the extraordinary “comprehensive chart” of antitheses Auden constructed while teaching at Swarthmore and writing The Sea and the Mirror, which can be found in Later Auden. ↩ In general it is true that the diagnostician took over, and in the later poems an urbane, benevolent, slightly smug Auden is forever lecturing, warning, or advising his readers. Also, the poems became very long indeed. “New Year Letter” (1941), “For the Time Being” (1944), and The Age of Anxiety might be rated partial successes. “For the Time Being” (subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”) began life as a libretto for Benjamin Britten and has good bits—the wise men, the narrator—as well as long, indigestible passages, particularly Saint Simeon’s meditation:

This Christmas my partner is doing the ‘grief work’ Laird describes. These are the series of days and weeks when he is someone’s son before he is someone’s partner or friend or colleague and they seem harder for it. The movie is over, yet the screening reels on through your eyes […] In the dark you’d been watching a storm that will not die down in the light.’

Broadcast

The Evenings is also brilliantly insightful on adult child-parent relationships. Over and over, as Frits watches his father blow his nose or his mother eating, I was guffawing at his commentary. (‘His father… examined the linen closely and put the handkerchief away. “Approved and accepted with no visible anomalies”, Frits said…’) It would have been infuriating to watch me reading this with that big stupid grin on my face the whole time. Frits would have hated it. I’m ending this year much like I started it by playing some music low and tinkering with a poem. Dreaming of trains across the sea. Publisher Ithys Press is unrepentant, saying, “The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather.” Two men, two artists, both named Asle, weave their way through the streets of Bjorgevin in Jon Fosse’s Septology, through chapters comprising a single, sinuous, supple yet graceful sentence filled with echoes and subtly shifting repetitions, at once limpid as water and nebulous as mist seen through a veil. Are they indeed two, on simply avatars of a singular life lived differently, of paths taken and not taken, passions kindled and spent, talents used and wasted? We cannot know—but most importantly: in the resplendent, all-encompassing whole, such prosaic details do not matter. Lisa Owens’s novel Not Working was published by Picador in 2016. She also writes short stories and screenplays, and lives in London.Her story ‘Chemistry Read’ was published here in September.

The second line’s unusual syntax replicates the cumbersome nature of the body, so the subject of the sentence, the soul, the “it,” finds itself in the middle of the clause swamped on either side by excess, the mild alliteration of “the body became for” on one side and on the other the assonance of “too large a garment.” There is a sense of menace in that buried phrase “came for it” as one might come for a condemned man.

Museum of the Year

We've lived in 13 places in 13 years. I love lots of things about America, but there's so much that is completely crazy: the health system; obviously the gun thing. To be away from your home as a writer can be good in some ways, but can also be a limitation, especially as a poet. To be away from your first language can be difficult, but at the same time Joyce – not that Joyce has anything to do with me – reconstructed Dublin from Zürich and Paris and I suppose I've just written a new book which sometimes seems as if it's entirely about Northern Ireland." There are, of course, plenty of beautiful novels that forefront identity and struggle; many of them rightfully and widely celebrated. But too often, mediocre writers—encouraged by curators with money and platforms—are selected to lend a feeling of knowledge to people who aren’t us. And almost all art by marginalised people is dressed up as art “about” political propositions. As a result, most people don’t know what Syrian fiction looks like, or LGBT fiction, or any of the other fiction from the “margins.” Even if it is in front of them. Mary Morrissy’s fourth novel, Penelope Unbound, will be published by Banshee Press in 2023. A member of Aosdána, she is a journalist and teacher of creative writing. The painting depicts a woman in full profile, dressed in a red coat, gripping an umbrella and bent against the wind, passing in front of Trinity College Dublin. In the top left-hand corner the plinth (and legs!) of Oliver Goldsmith’s statue is just visible, but it’s the rain that commands your attention. Jagged slashes with almost solid geometrical shadows sweep downwards from left to the right of the canvas. You can sense the physicality of the driving rain, sharp as razor blades, flinty and unforgiving. It’s a dirty Dublin day.